All through Episode 1 I kept asking myself if this was a straight ripoff of an episode I'd already seen. Fact of the matter is that the plot components are an amalgam of aired episodes, and there's minimal new or engaging to continue to buy further episodes of this game. I'm stopping at #1, as I know Telltale can do better (Sam & Max and Monkey island were sooo cool!):winslow:

SPOILER WARNING:

This comment may contain spoilers!

jannar85;573195 said:

It's sad it's not close to CSI. Not gonna buy this, hoping for puzzle solving adventure games

I dunno. Stepping back and realizing that it's a Law & Order game, how would puzzle solving elements make sense? Just thinking about some of the puzzles in Tales of Monkey Island or Sam & Max, they would be completely out of place in a game about Law & Order. I mean, what would you have them put in the game? A never ending section of city intersections that detectives in modern New York City can't navigate through until they find a secret map that tells them which directions to go in to advance? No thanks, that would just be silly.

People actually read that wall of crap? I couldn't get any farther than this gem:

The genius puzzle here is, of course, Use Tire Iron with Tire, which certainly requires thinking "outside of the box".

Oh dear, how dare a solution to a puzzle be straight forward? Logic and common sense are not allowed in point and click adventure games. Everything must be so off the wall and nonsensical that you spend hours rubbing everything in your inventory with every possible point of interaction until something works, because there's absolutely no way to apply any kind of rational logic to it. If every single puzzle in every game was as completely nonsensical as stopping Whizzer's Cider of Knowledge plan in episode 5 of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space*, they wouldn't be any fun to play. It'd just be a bunch of frustrating rounds of clicking everything over and over until someone figured it out and wrote a guide so everyone else could get through.

Honestly, if that's the kind of extremely pointless nitpicking that guy wants to bring to the table, I'm not even going to be bothered to read the rest and I'm probably not going to be too bothered to concern myself with the thoughts of anyone who takes that rant seriously.

*[spoiler]You want to stop Whizzer from getting people to repeat the original sin of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Stopping him requires taking a bottle of his cider made from that fruit and pouring it in a cooler so people drink it, thus making all those people repeat the original sin, even though you're meant to stop people from drinking it. How in the hell does that make ANY sense?![/spoiler]

SPOILER WARNING:

This comment may contain spoilers!

mjc0961;575284 said:

People actually read that wall of crap? I couldn't get any farther than this gem:

Oh dear, how dare a solution to a puzzle be straight forward? Logic and common sense are not allowed in point and click adventure games. Everything must be so off the wall and nonsensical that you spend hours rubbing everything in your inventory with every possible point of interaction until something works, because there's absolutely no way to apply any kind of rational logic to it. If every single puzzle in every game was as completely nonsensical as stopping Whizzer's Cider of Knowledge plan in episode 5 of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space*, they wouldn't be any fun to play. It'd just be a bunch of frustrating rounds of clicking everything over and over until someone figured it out and wrote a guide so everyone else could get through.

Honestly, if that's the kind of extremely pointless nitpicking that guy wants to bring to the table, I'm not even going to be bothered to read the rest and I'm probably not going to be too bothered to concern myself with the thoughts of anyone who takes that rant seriously.

*[spoiler]You want to stop Whizzer from getting people to repeat the original sin of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Stopping him requires taking a bottle of his cider made from that fruit and pouring it in a cooler so people drink it, thus making all those people repeat the original sin, even though you're meant to stop people from drinking it. How in the hell does that make ANY sense?![/spoiler]

I think you're defending your point without standing on a basis of argument. Everything you say in this post makes me inclined that you don't know how to play an "adventure" game, which isn't all that bad, and you don't know how to empathize with an adventure gamer, which isn't also really all that bad. What's bad is you're in heated controversy, implying what you say is true.

I like my game to challenge my mind. I don't know how you play your games but I don't check walkthroughs. I do get stuck, many often in fact, but the part of the fun is to solve the issue after looking at the issue in every angle imaginable. Compared to that, if your adventure game's highlight puzzle is about USE TIRE IRON WITH TIRE, I don't think even you can defend this. As an adventure game, BttF lacks certain aromas -which all are what experienced adventure gamers crave for. As a game that tells me a story, I also didn't like the story, but it's irrelevant as of now. Point is, your argument heavily relies on "Oh so you like adventure games like this, BUT WHY IS IT LIKE THAT ANYWAY? Huh? You're WRONG". I have no problems with people liking BttF. But it's certainly problematic that people like you completely blindfolds theirselves to the shoutings of a certain minority, desperately trying to defend that such problems do not EXIST, and doing all those with the misusage of words such as "nitpicking", "crap" and sarcastic blabbery.

If you've read that post a little more you could see that Dashing comments on EVERY MINOR OR MAJOR DETAIL THAT CAUGHT HIS EYE during his playthrough of the said episode, meaning, I don't think he left out a single element of the episode the episode wanted to "give" you, and he didn't simply like them as well. I think it contradicts heavily with the definition of nitpicking.

I wish the PC/Mac version of L&O was out soon, because right now I think a couple of guys are just going back and forth about a game they have never even played.

Dashing's BTTF analysis (which I approve) is of course a lampoon. Visible disappointment with the game puts certain things more into focus than others, which doesn't necessarily make the critique less valid. Such massive effort to analyse every detail necessarily results in "nitpicking". Of course it does. I feel that this is quite all right though because neither is the big picture neglected, nor can a good adventure game afford to disregard said details. But this is not the place to talk about BTTF yet again.

What we have here are the clashing critiques of two extremes - uninspired, entirely "easy" puzzles on the one hand and illogical "hard" puzzles on the other. I can say with some certainty that most people on these forums would wish for game designers to find a balance between the two, to keep the feeling of a challenge high while avoiding frustration. And who knows, you might even both belong to that group.

"Adventure" is already one of the least defined genres in video game culture. And from the look of things, applying the "adventure" puzzle paradigm to L&O might be a bit more difficult here than it was in BTTF.

From reports up to now, I have classified L&O:L as less of a "puzzle solving" experience and more of a "choose your own adventure" design. Cases act out differently according to your choices, results will explicitly vary. Seems like a valid and interesting concept to me, so I'd give it a try and reserve judgement for later.

Honestly, if that's the kind of extremely pointless nitpicking that guy wants to bring to the table, I'm not even going to be bothered to read the rest and I'm probably not going to be too bothered to concern myself with the thoughts of anyone who takes that rant seriously.

I'm not going to start another BttF debate in the L&O forums. If you want to argue against what Dashing said then it would be best to do it in his thread.

Well, I must say, I was disappointed in JP. Why? It played like a movie. But it's a good thing too, but I miss the interaction, the puzzles and stuff. Even though it's tense, it could have been better in many ways. I don't really like the direction TT is heading, I know TT opens up for a broader audience, but we adventure gamers that has been here from the beginning still is waiting for the next puzzle-solving game.

I mean, TT was the new LucasArts. Then they rocked like kings when they got S&M and MI. I just hope with TWD they can show us that they still are here Maybe even make two different approaches. One option with puzzles and one without. Like MI2 (easy and hard).

If they are stopping developing real adventure games, I hope they tell me soon, so I won't have to be disappoined by their next releases

If they only were developing the Monkey Island movie..... with puzzles :P